Pat Quinn: smokers will pay for student's college tuition
The Chicago Sun-Times’ Fran Spielman reports that Mayor Richard Daley doesn’t want to raise property taxes in order to close a $520 million shortfall for the city’s upcoming, 2010 budget. Daley instead wants to raid city reserve funds — using rainy-day money that was generated from long-term public-private deals like Chicago’s 75-year contract to privatize the city’s parking meters. Such a move could jeopardize the city’s AA bond rating.
Meanwhile, the Illinois state legislature meets today and the Chicago Tribune’s Monique Garcia reports that legislators and Gov. Pat Quinn have already decided not to make long-term decisions about state budget problems:
…[L]awmakers have no plans to tackle the overarching budget issues, including Quinn’s proposal for an income tax increase. They will instead focus on a relatively small but immediate problem — finding $200 million to pay for scholarships for 137,000 low-income students enrolled in college this spring.
While Democratic and Republican leaders agree on the need to pay for the scholarships, known as Monetary Award Program grants, there is no clear-cut plan. Quinn has backed a Senate-passed measure that would raise the cigarette tax to pay down a backlog in medical bills, saying that would free up other state money for the scholarships.
So both Quinn and Daley are taking short cuts, instead of at least proposing a tax increase. The main arguments against an increased property tax and a steeper income tax are that A.) you don’t raise taxes in a recession and B.) it’s political poison to raises taxes, especially with the 2010 primary coming up in February.
What’s missing here on both the city and state level is anyone with the political security to say that raiding break-glass-in-case-of-emergency-funds and enacting the umpteenth regressive tax on cigarettes is not sustainable fiscal policy. The ‘anything but taxes’ form of government puts both the city and state in a limbo where where good-government doesn’t depend on political leaders foresight or management skills but instead a national economic recovery that might replenish tax revenue. Daley and Quinn’s uninspiring strategy is to avoid announcing a tax increase and then cross their fingers that outside forces will make the current budget nightmares go away.
